When I first heard Charlie Brown goes to South Africa, my reaction was “Check these American cats, trying to sound like us!” 

On alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett’s Charlie Brown  goes to Cape Town, Chris Dave (drummer) lays the groove down a Goema pattern with his feet, but it is what is happening up top that is very different from how we play Goema. For starters he is playing with sticks, Goema is generally played with brushes. Chris also plays the snare drum with snares turned off, making it sound more like a hand percussion instrument, than a snare drum. But, perhaps the most dynamic element of his performance is his use of cymbals. From the introduction, Chris Dave lays down a gentle wash with his ride cymbal, punctuated with accents on  splash cymbals and snare drum rim shots, and crash cymbals.

Chris “Daddy” Dave hails from the city of Houston, Texas, a city with a history of drummers that have a unique sound, aka the Houston Sound. This is a very important fact to remember when looking at Chris’s “role” in this song. The song revolves around a bass line that is doubled by the piano at the very start of the introduction and continues throughout most of the song.The chord progression is pretty calm/ minimal by Kenny Garrett’s standards and so the way Chris plays is adding momentum and “energy” for the soloist to work off.  

Some context: the great Kenny Garrett and the late piano colossus Kenny Kirkland both have a chromatic and angular style of improvising, regularly using rhythmic devices like displacement, over the bar line resolutions, polyrhythms, etc. Chris Dave uses similar techniques to create a “rhythmic typography” with peaks,valleys and plateaus, all the while floating over the Goema bass drum and hi hat pattern/ostinato.

Not everyone wants to hear this kind of drumming on a Goema song, so please don’t repeat my mistake, and use some situational awareness. In general, not always, but often enough, Goema songs at this tempo tend to have a nostalgic quality to them, and so this kind of playing might always be what the composer had in mind.

Another important thing to consider would be WHO is in the band, both Kenny Garrett and Kenny Kirkland played with Jeff “Tain” Watts for more than a decade. Chris Dave has a similar style to Tain, and so being “busy” was probably what they were looking for anyway. 

While it’s not the Goema groove for all seasons, it does give those of us who have always heard it played a certain way, the chance to hear what Goema would sound like from somebody else’s perspective.